Friday, October 31, 2014

I think that I have a fairly well-developed epistemology,
but a recent conversation made me realize that it might be prudent to explore
and formalize how I (ideally) determine what is true and what the implications
of those methods might be.

First I need to define my terms.

Something is "true" if it conforms to the facts.
Truths are usually objective and could be determined by anyone with enough
information. People don't get to have their own truths about anything except
highly subjective things, like, say, what the best flavor of ice cream is.

A "belief" is something that is held to be true, to
a greater or lesser degree. It is not necessarily something that one is absolutely
sure about, as there is virtually nothing that we can be sure of with complete
certainty. It is also not to be confused with faith, which is act or state of holding
a belief without proof.

Monday, October 27, 2014

There are several ways of viewing what halacha is. I think
the most common conception is that halacha is a set of rules that Hashem gave
us in order to guide us in living the best possible life. In this view, Hashem
is personally pleased or displeased by our actions, intentions matter, and we are
rewarded and punished accordingly. Rabbinic emendations to halacha are attempts
to safeguard the rules and to improve our likelihood of pleasing Hashem and
living a good life.

A Maimonadeanfriend of mine sees
halacha as a set of laws given to us by Hashem which we are then free to build
on using a duly appointed system of courts. In this view, halacha is a system
for keeping society together, as is any legal system, and for carrying out the
Divine purpose. It is superior to other legal systems because its foundation is
divine, but sin is not a matter of
displeasing God (though He may be displeased when we break halacha) but a
matter of jurisprudence.

A third way of seeing halacha is as a reflection of the
workings of a hidden world, a guide to the physics of the metaphysical. So we
refrain from, say, eating non-kosher
foods not because (or not solely because) eating treif displeases God or because
it's illegal, but because non-kosher foods are poisonous to our souls. In this
view, intentions don't matter. Poison will kill you whether you intended to
ingest it or not. Non-kosher food will
damage your soul whether you knew it was treif or not.

Where this view runs into problems is the fact that most of
halacha as it's now practiced is midirabanan, and different communities have different
, equally legitimate halachic practices. Some things are easy to justify as
enhancing a mitzvah or safeguarding us from sin, but others are disagreements
about what the halacha itself prescribes. If halacha reflects metaphysical
reality, then it MUST BE that differing halachos/minhagim in different places reflect
different local metaphysical realities. It further follows that local poskim,
through issuing their rulings, are actively changing their local metaphysical
realities. Given that halacha often describes physical phenomena or depends on how they work,
it's only a small leap to then say that local pesak changes physical as well as
metaphysical reality.

So it turns out that the position that pesak changes
metaphysical and possibly even physical reality, which seems as hardcore a mystical
position as there can be, is arrived at through rationalist logic.

About Me

I grew up in New York in what would now be called a liberal Yeshivish family. I went to a Yeshivish elementary school, a right-wing Yeshivish high-school, and spent several years in Beis Medrash.
I currently live in an Orthodox Jewish community in a mid-sized city with my wonderful wife (who is fully aware of my opinions) and our kids. I have a masters in psychology, consider myself a history buff (particularly of military history), and have an active interest in philosophy, theology, and social psychology. I’ve always been a skeptic, but usually the only one – the only one in my Orthodox Jewish high school, the only one in the post-high school yeshiva I went to, the only one in my family. Then a few years ago I stumbled across the Jewish skeptics’ blogosphere, and I was amazed to find people just like me. A little over a year later I started my own blog, http://2nd-son.blogspot.com/ where I write about my experiences, philosophy, and theology, get my thoughts in order, and generally try to convince myself that I’m an intellectual.